Hobo Blues - Dennis Fridd (Rundelania)

He got off in Santa Fe, then rode the red line up to Denver.  The mountain air tore at his throat, settled cold and hard in his lungs, the inverse of a good pull of whiskey, but there were no bulls in the yard that night.  That was something.

Some claimed the mountain air made the cure last longer, kept the rooting at bay, but Morris didn’t believe it.  He had taken the cure in Boston, in Memphis, in Miami, sweating through an army surplus cot while his head screamed from the pressure, in Los Angeles, too, Philadelphia—it seemed like every few years he needed to take the cure again.  Sometimes they’d give him pills, other times it was a needle straight in the crook of the arm, a sharp pain and a plunger pushing a dirty brown liquid like the wash water in a St. Jonestown prison deep into his veins.  In either case he was flat on his back for twenty or thirty or forty-eight hours afterwards, his head filled with visions of angels and prosperity.  His tongue taped to his chin for good measure.

Most of the places made him read from the bible too, but it wasn’t so bad because they fed him a hot meal before sending him on his way.  The bedding and the heat in the ministries was almost always preferable to the clinics run by the state, whose concrete walls wept like religious statues.

He was not in Denver for the quality of the air but its viciousness.  This time of year the cold kept most of his fellow vagabonds out of the Northern Midwest, where the snowdrifts could rise high enough to entomb any man who made the mistake of sleeping out in the open... Rundelania